Devlog 1: Game Progress

First Level

The theme for the first level is "industrial  testing facility/laboratory" or "dirty hospital with lava pits".

Lava pits were added with a placeholder appearance, which is a big glowing orange box. This will later be refined with shaders and textures.

A capsule falling into lava 

If the player falls into a lava pit they will slowly sink and die, being sent back to the starting point of the current stage.

A baked lighting test for the lava pits was done.

Scary lava glowing 

This will be done with higher settings once the levels are fleshed out with models and textures, point lights may also be added for real time lava glow landing on the players gun.

Timer

A timer has been added that starts when a player starts a level and will reset when the player dies or resets back to the start with the R key.

Player speedrunning into lava 

The timers results are stored and the top 10 are ordered and displayed, currently they are displayed in the debug log, but will be updated later to be in a nice menu :)

Grapple Gun System

Most of the systems and scripts involving the grappling hook launcher have now been set up. It uses a stack of scripts that have all been written to allow for easy configuration and hotswapping capabilities of multiple different grappling guns. Not only does this allow us to rapidly test different grappling performance configurations, it also provides the possibility of different grappling hook skins as a feature for the player. 

The grappling physics are currently quite basic, but allows for some redirection of momentum already.

The connective beam is also fairly configurable, and can be swapped between on the grappling guns by simply changing a prefab reference.

More specific visual effects such as particulates and dynamic lighting are planned for unique beam types.

The hooks will embed themselves into the object they hit, with grappler-dependent settings determining how much the hook tilts between the direction it was launched from and the perpendicular of the attached surface. The position on the hook that the beam visually connects to is also configurable via a single float value.  

"Why would you design the grappler system to be so overly modular?" you may ask. A grappling hook system needed to be created regardless, so coding to allow modularity is simply a different methodology to that of hard-coding, with little increase in actual work done. Additionally, the time saved in later development more than makes up for any increased early workload, even if we don't end up having multiple grappling hook guns.

Menu Functionality

The menu was created and was given level selection functionality, made in a way that allows for easy adding of new levels using scriptable objects.

Menu demonstration with beautiful camera fade 

The backspace button also takes the player back to the menu, for quick and easy testing of different levels without having to find the scene in the folder.

Difficulties

At the moment the movement of the player feels a bit slippery, we are working to refine the movement a lot as it is a vital core mechanic of the game. 

The grapple gun will also be tweaked for better swinging around corners, as it currently is not acting exactly as we would like.

There is also a single frame between scene loads where it displays a message that a camera is not connected, I would like to fix that.